In this article

What is Azure Logic Apps?

01/12/2018

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In this article

Logic Apps helps you build, schedule,
and automate processes as workflows so you can integrate apps, data,
systems, and services across enterprises or organizations. Logic Apps simplifies how you
design and create scalable solutions for app integration, data integration, system integration,
enterprise application integration (EAI), and business-to-business (B2B) communication,
whether in the cloud, on premises, or both.

For example, here are just a few workloads that you can automate with logic apps:

Process and route orders across on-premises systems and cloud services.

Move uploaded files from an FTP server to Azure Storage.

Monitor tweets for a specific subject, analyze the sentiment,
and create alerts or tasks for items that need review.

To build integration solutions with logic apps, choose from
a growing gallery of ~200 built-in connectors,
such as SQL Database, Azure services, Office 365, Salesforce,
Google, and more. These connectors provide
triggers, actions,
or both for creating logic apps that securely access and process data in real time.

How does Logic Apps work?

Every logic app workflow starts with a trigger,
which fires when a specific event happens,
or when new available data meets specific criteria.
Many triggers include basic scheduling capabilities so
that you can specify how regularly your workloads run.
For more custom scheduling scenarios,
start your workflows with the Schedule trigger.
Learn more about how to build schedule-based workflows.

Each time that the trigger fires, the Logic Apps engine
creates a logic app instance that runs the workflow's actions.
These actions can also include data conversions and flow controls,
such as conditional statements, switch statements, loops, and branching.
For example, this logic app starts with a Dynamics 365 trigger with the
built-in criteria "When a record is updated". If the trigger detects an
event that matches this criteria, the trigger fires and runs the workflow's actions.
Here, these actions include XML transformation, data updates, decision branching,
and email notifications.

You can build your logic apps visually with the Logic Apps Designer,
available in the Azure portal through your browser and in Visual Studio.
For more custom logic apps, you can create or edit logic app definitions
in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) by working in "code view" mode.
You can also use Azure PowerShell commands and Azure Resource Manager
templates for select tasks. Logic apps deploy and run in the cloud on Azure.
For a more detailed introduction, watch this video:
Use Azure Enterprise Integration Services to run cloud apps at scale

Why use Logic Apps?

With businesses moving toward digitization, logic apps help you connect legacy
systems, modern, and cutting-edge systems more easily and quickly by providing
prebuilt APIs as Microsoft-managed connectors. That way, you can focus on your
apps' business logic and functionality. You don't have to worry about building,
hosting, scaling, managing, maintaining, and monitoring your apps.
Logic Apps handles these concerns for you. Plus,
you pay only for what you use based on a consumption
pricing model.

In many cases, you won't have to write code. But if you must write some code,
you can create code snippets with Azure Functions
and run that code on-demand from logic apps. Also, if your logic apps
need to interact with events from Azure services, custom apps, or third-party solutions,
you can use Azure Event Grid
with your logic apps for event monitoring, routing, and publishing.

Logic Apps, Functions, and Event Grid are fully managed by Microsoft Azure,
which frees you from worries about building, hosting, scaling,
managing, monitoring, and maintaining your solutions.
With the capability to create "serverless" apps and solutions,
you can just focus on the business logic. These services
automatically scale to meet your needs, make integrations faster,
and help you build robust cloud apps with minimal code.
Plus, you pay only for what you use, based on a consumption
pricing model.

To learn how companies improved their agility and
increased focus on their core businesses when they combined
Logic Apps with other Azure services and Microsoft products,
check out these customer stories.

Here are more details about the capabilities and benefits that you get with Logic Apps:

Visually build workflows with easy-to-use tools

Save time and simplify complex processes with visual design tools.
Build logic apps from start-to-finish by using the Logic Apps Designer through your
browser in the Azure portal or in Visual Studio. Start your workflow with a trigger,
and add any number of actions from the connectors gallery.

Get started faster with logic app templates

Create commonly used solutions more quickly when you choose predefined workflows
from the template gallery.
Templates range from simple connectivity for software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps
to advanced B2B solutions plus "just for fun" templates. Learn how to
create logic apps from prebuilt templates.

Connect disparate systems across different environments

Some patterns and workflows are easy to describe but hard to implement in code.
Logic apps help you seamlessly connect disparate systems across on-premises
and cloud environments. For example, you can connect a cloud marketing solution
to an on-premises billing system, or centralize messaging across APIs and
systems with an Enterprise Service Bus. Logic apps provide a fast, reliable,
and consistent way to deliver reusable and reconfigurable solutions for these scenarios.

First-class support for enterprise integration and B2B scenarios

Businesses and organizations electronically communicate
with each other by using industry-standard but different
message protocols and formats, such as EDIFACT, AS2, and X12.
With the features in the Enterprise Integration Pack (EIP),
you can build logic apps that transform message formats used by
your partners into formats that your organization's systems
can interpret and process. Logic apps handles these exchanges
smoothly and also securely with encryption and digital signatures.

Start small with your current systems and services,
and grow incrementally at your own pace. When you're ready,
Logic Apps and the EIP help you implement and scale up to more
mature integration scenarios by providing these capabilities and more:

If you don't find the connector that you want or need to run custom code,
you can extend logic apps by creating and calling your own code snippets
on-demand through Azure Functions.
Create your own APIs and
custom connectors
that you can call from logic apps.

Pay only for what you use

Logic Apps uses consumption-based pricing and metering
unless you have logic apps previously created with App Service plans.

Key terms

Workflow: Visualize, design, build, automate,
and deploy business processes as series of steps.

Managed connectors: Your logic apps need access to data, services, and systems.
You can use prebuilt Microsoft-managed connectors that are designed to connect, access,
and work with your data. See Connectors for Azure Logic Apps

Triggers: Many Microsoft-managed connectors provide triggers
that fire when events or new data meet specified conditions.
For example, an event might be getting an email or
detecting changes in your Azure Storage account.
Each time the trigger fires, the Logic Apps engine
creates a new logic app instance that runs the workflow.

Actions: Actions are all the steps that happen after the trigger.
Each action usually maps to an operation that's defined by a managed connector,
custom API, or custom connector.

How does Logic Apps differ from Functions, WebJobs, and Flow?

All these services help you "glue" and connect disparate systems together.
Each service has their advantages and benefits, so combining their capabilities
is the best way to quickly build a scalable, full-featured integration system.
For more information, see Choose between Flow, Logic Apps, Functions, and WebJobs.

Get started

Logic Apps is one of the many services hosted on Microsoft Azure.
So before you start, you need an Azure subscription.
If you don't have a subscription,
sign up for a free Azure account.